The Man Who Invented Christmas (14 page)

The ads in the weeklies and in
Blackwood’s Monthly,
and the announcement in
Chuzzlewit
would have been welcome, of course, but Dickens was rightly concerned that the book would not be given wide placement in the holiday issues of the monthly magazines. Still, Chapman and Hall might be forgiven for holding back on advertising a book that was not fully their enterprise. While they would receive a commission on sales, this was Dickens’s project, after all.

William Bradbury, who printed Dickens’s works for Chapman and Hall, had told Dickens that he, for one, could not believe this omission. “And he [Bradbury] says that nothing but a tremendous push can possibly atone for such fatal negligence,” an anxious Dickens wrote to Mitton.

Mitton, who had already received a copy of the proofs of
A Christmas Carol,
came through with the loan and wrote back to buck up the spirits of his friend and client, assuring Dickens that it was excellent work indeed. Dickens responded graciously, “I am extremely glad you
feel
the Carol,” he told him. “For I knew I meant a good thing.” Still, there was a hint of desperation in the postscript of this letter to his solicitor: “Bradbury predicts Heaven knows what. I am sure it will do me a great deal of good; and I hope it will sell, well.”

Along with the proofs to Mitton, Dickens is known to have presented pre-publication copies of
A Christmas Carol
to at least eleven others, including Miss Burdett Coutts, Thomas Carlyle, Forster, Walter Savage Landor, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose copy is inscribed, “To W. M. Thackeray from Charles Dickens (Whom he made very happy once, a long way from home).” While the source of the sentiment of this inscription is uncertain, and while Thackeray was known to be somewhat patronizing even when approving of Dickens’s work, the reference is probably to a scathing review Thackeray wrote the year before for
Fraser’s Magazine,
a condemnation of a bastardized French stage production of
Nicholas Nickleby.
(“Of the worthy Boz,” Thackeray said, “he has no more connection with the geniuses who invested this drama than a peg has with a gold-laced hat.”) Dickens also sent off a presentation copy to the poet Samuel Rogers. “If you should ever have inclination and patience to read the accompanying little book,” he told Rogers, who was then in his eighties, “I hope you will like the slight fancy it embodies.”

While Forster, Mitton, and others had written encouraging replies to Dickens regarding
A Christmas Carol,
it is fortunate for the author that he didn’t know what Rogers thought of it. Rogers’s nephew wrote to an acquaintance that when Dickens’s new book was mentioned, his uncle “said he had been looking at it the night before; the first half hour was so dull it sent him to sleep, and the next hour was so painful that he should be obliged to finish it to get rid of the impression. He blamed Dickens’s style very much, and said there was no wit in putting bad grammar into the mouths of all his characters, and showing their vulgar pronunciation by spelling ‘are’ ‘air’, a horse without an
h
: none of our best writers do that.”

What Dickens did hear in the form of the first public pronouncement upon his book came in the
Morning Chronicle
on December 19. Charles Mackay began his review in that paper by declaring, “Mr. Dickens here has produced a most appropriate Christmas offering and one which, if properly made use of, may yet we hope, lead to some more valuable result…than mere amusement.”

Mackay, a subeditor at the paper, went on to say, “It is impossible to read this little volume through, however hastily, without perceiving that its composition was prompted by a spirit of wide and wholesome philanthropy—a spirit to which selfishness in enjoyment is an inconceivable idea—a spirit that knows where happiness can exist, and ought to exist, and will not be happy itself till it has done something toward promoting its growth here. If such spirits could be multiplied, as the copies of this little book we doubt not will be…what a happy Christmas indeed should we yet have this 1843!” Mackay closed his review by assuring readers, “We heartily recommend this little volume as an amusing companion, and a wholesome monitor, to all who would enjoy in truth and in spirit ‘A merry Christmas and a happy New Year.’”

On the twenty-second, the reviewer for the
Sun
urged the book upon its readers, and added, “[D]o not suppose because it is a ghost-story that it is a mere frivolous exercise of the fancy.” And the
Atlas
cautioned its readers not to mistake the book for some trivial piece of seasonal fluff. Anyone “who perhaps took it up in the expectation of finding some careless trifle thrown off for the occasion…like the contribution to an annual, will find himself agreeably mistaken. A glance at the first page or two will convince him that only Boz in his happier vein could have penned it.”

On December 23 the
Athenaeum
pronounced that
A Christmas Carol
was “[a] tale to make the reader laugh and cry—open his hands, and open his heart to charity even towards the uncharitable—wrought up with a thousand minute and tender touches of the true ‘Boz’ workmanship—is indeed—a dainty dish to set before a King.” The reviewer describes the story as “capitally
caroled
in prose by Mr. Dickens and will call out, we hope a chorus of ‘Amens’…from the Land’s End to John o’Groat’s house.”

Fellow essayist and friend Leigh Hunt opined on that same day in the
Examiner
that the slender volume would soon be in “everyone’s hands,” praising its vivid and hearty style and predicting that “thousands on thousands of readers” would find it the excuse to raise a chorus of praise to Christmas.

Meanwhile, along with such glowing reports, what Dickens heard principally over those first halcyon days of his “little project” was the jingling of coins into booksellers’ tills. In four short days, every one of the 6,000 copies that Dickens had printed were sold.

Such an unqualified commercial and critical reception of the book was enough to send its author into a paroxysm of joy and a celebration of the season unlike any before: As he wrote his American friend Felton, “Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind man’s huffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before.” In the space of only hours, many of the cares that had oppressed him for nearly two years seemed to evaporate.

Jane Carlyle, wife of the noted satirist and herself among the most attractive and lively members of the London literary set, wrote a letter to a friend the day after she attended a children’s Christmas party where the rejuvenated Dickens was also a guest, suggesting something of the effect his success had produced in him:

“It was the very most agreeable party that ever I was at in London,” she gushed. “Dickens and Forster above all exerted themselves till the perspiration was pouring down and they seemed
drunk
with their efforts. Only think of that Dickens playing the
conjuror
for one whole hour—the best conjuror I ever saw.”

Mrs. Carlyle described how Dickens, with Forster serving as his assistant, boiled a plum pudding in someone’s top hat, transformed ladies’ handkerchiefs into candies, and a boxful of bran into a squealing guinea pig. It was all done quite professionally, Mrs. Carlyle thought, enough so that Dickens might think of taking up that line of endeavor should the book trade ever let him down.

“Dickens did all but go down on his knees to make
me
—waltz with
him,
” she added, “but I thought I did my part well enough in talking the maddest nonsense with him, Forster, Thackeray and Maclise—without attempting the Impossible.”

Mrs. Carlyle’s account suggests that what had begun as a children’s party ended by approaching the level of a Roman Saturnalia: “In fact the thing was rising into something not unlike the rape of the Sabines!” she said, “when somebody looked [at] her watch and exclaimed ‘twelve o’clock!’ Whereupon we all rushed to the cloak-room—and there and in the lobby and up to the last moment the mirth raged on—Dickens took home Thackeray and Forster with him and his wife ‘to finish the night there’ and a royal night they would have of it I fancy!”

Indeed, Dickens now seemed to embody the very spirit of generosity he had written about in
A Christmas Carol.
He wrote at once to Mackay at the
Morning Chronicle
to express his gratitude for that first glowing review, saying, “Believe me that your pleasure in the Carol, so earnestly and spontaneously expressed, gives me real gratification of heart. It has delighted me very much…your praise is manly and generous; and well worth having. Thank you heartily.”

With every copy of
A Christmas Carol
sold, his doubts about his ability diminished; and the same critics who had dismissed him for his recent dreary stories were now stumbling over themselves to praise his uplifting message. If Dickens had ever believed the old maxim that he was only as good as his next book, then suddenly he was very good indeed. Chapman and Hall rushed through a second printing, and then, before the passing of the New Year, ordered up a third.

Inevitably, not all the reviews were entirely favorable. While the
Dublin Review
grumbled that the book might have strayed a bit too far from the holy antecedents that gave the season its true meaning, nonetheless, the editors admitted, “It is long since we read prose or poetry which pleased us more.” The
Morning Post
weighed in with certain reservations as well, noting that the book “has all Mr. Dickens’s mannerisms, and is so far (to us) displeasing and absurd; but it has touches of genius too, mixed up with its huge extravagance, and a few of those little happy strokes of simple pathos,” attributes that, the editors rather astutely noted, were also those that accounted for “his great popularity.”

But for the most part, the reviews were glowing enough to fulfill any writer’s most ardent fantasies.
Bell’s Weekly Messenger
said that Dickens had, in
A Christmas Carol,
“converted an incredible fiction into one of the strongest exhibitions of religious and moral truth, and into one of the most picturesque poetical allegories which we possess in our language.”

The
Magazine of Domestic Economy and Family Review
chimed in, declaring, “If ever a writer deserved public honours for the service he has rendered to his kind, that man is Charles Dickens and the
Christmas Carol
should be read and reverenced in all to come as a glorious manual of Christian duties.”

The
Sunday Times
proclaimed the book “an exquisite gem in its way…. Generally the tone of the story is sweet and subdued, but occasionally it soars, and becomes altogether sublime.” And even the presumptuous Thackeray had to throw up his hands when searching for something negative to say. “I do not mean that the
Christmas Carol
is quite as brilliant or self-evident as the sun at noonday,” he began, “but it is so spread over England by this time that no skeptic, no
Frasers’s Magazine
[where his review was being run]—no, not even the gold-like and ancient
Quarterly
itself…could review it down.”

Thackeray gave it his all in trying to find something negative to say about the book, but clearly Dickens, “even if he had little Latin and less Greek,” had put him to the test this time out. “I am not sure the allegory is a very complete one,” he muttered, “and [I] protest, with the classics, against the use of blank verse in prose; but here all objections stop.”

By the end, this university-educated blue-blood, who had always begrudged the self-taught Dickens’s success and popular appeal, simply bowed his head before the book’s power: “The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, ‘God bless him!’” For once, Thackeray was willing to be magnanimous. “What a feeling this is for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap!”

12.

D
ickens wrote a simple preface to the original edition of his
Carol,
in which he expressed relatively modest hopes: “I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book,” he said, “to raise the Ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it!”

As it happened, few did choose to turn away from
A Christmas Carol.
Dickens also wrote enthusiastically to Miss Burdett Coutts on December 27: “You will be glad to hear, I know, that my
Carol
is a prodigious success.” Forster would say, “Never had little book an outset so full of brilliancy of promise. It was hailed on every side with enthusiastic greeting. The first edition of six thousand copies was sold the first day [
sic
], and on 3 January, he wrote to me that ‘two thousand of the three printed for second and third editions are already taken by the trade.’”

Shortly after the New Year, Dickens wrote to his American friend Cornelius Felton, including his own version of the party where he so dazzled Mrs. Carlyle: “If you could have seen me at a children’s party at Macreadys the other night, going down a country dance (something longer than the Library at Cambridge) with Mrs M. you would have thought I was a country Gentleman of independent property, residing on a tip-top farm, with the wind blowing straight in my face every day.”

And in that same missive he used a favorite device, discussing himself in the third person to describe the triumph of his new book: “By every post, all manner of strangers write all manner of letters to him about their homes and hearths, and how this same Carol is read aloud there and kept on a very little shelf by itself. Indeed it is the greatest success as I am told, that this ruff an and rascal has ever achieved.”